


Prodigal

by Palpalou



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-24
Updated: 2018-04-24
Packaged: 2019-04-27 09:50:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 549
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14422827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Palpalou/pseuds/Palpalou
Summary: Stacker Pentecost keeps an eye on the kaiju black market





	Prodigal

Stacker Pentecost kept an eye on the black markets.

A good general is always informed, not only of what happens on the field of battle but also of what is going on behind the lines. How the civilian population is faring. Whether the supply lines are holding. Where to fall back just in case. Whether the authorities are still ready to give you the funds and men necessary to wage your next battle. And the next. And the one after that. But a good general knows how to delegate too, and for a long time he had been satisfied to let the appropriate teams do their work.

He had started taking a personal interest in the situation reports three months and two weeks after Jake had disappeared.

The video had arrived on is desk purely by chance. The pad had been with a stack of other documents, raw information which had not yet been processed into a report but had still been taken to him. A mistake. He would have sent the whole thing back as soon had he'd noticed, and never watched the pad, but his headache was particularly strong that day. Straight lines wavered when he looked in one place for too long. Rather than try to read the small black print on bright white paper, he picked up the pad.

The camera caught Jake only for a few seconds. A glimpse of the side of his face against artificial lights, then the view moved to the gigantic remains of the kaiju they'd killed in Florida twelve days ago. People were working on its flank, cutting, sampling, taking away under the light of clandestine projectors. Regional authorities were supposed to keep people away from kaiju death sites, but who had the money and manpower to enforce that kind of thing nowadays ? Nobody, apart from the army. And the army had bigger fish to bring down. So the greedy and desperate were free to come poison themselves with the hazardous waste the corpses exhaled.

His son was there, Pentecost thought. It should have made him angry again, but his anger had fizzled out a few hours after he had learnt Jake never made it to the airport, giving way to a kind of feeling a few degrees colder than panic, and much more long-lived.

He phoned an old friend stationed in the newly recommissioned Miami Army Airfield. The old friend sent one of his most trustworthy men. But he didn't find Jake. Maybe he had left. Maybe he just didn't look in the right places. Maybe Jake had got on someone's bad side, done the stupid thing one too many times and Pentecost would never see his son again.

Maybe the war would end and he and Mako could take a vacation in Florida. Walk along the beaches. Look for a familiar face. Then they would go back home together, all three of them. He wasn't holding his breath.

He sent back the stack of unusable documents with a memo that he wanted to receive weekly compiled footage of black market movements.

Stacker Pentecost had half a day off per week. He spent it watching Kaiju corpses slowly rotting and men like ants scrambling under the heat of a magnifying glass. He never saw his son's face again.

 

**Author's Note:**

> :)


End file.
